Taking a Small Business to the Big Time Through Search

So you own a small e-commerce shop and are wondering how to expand your business? As you may or may not know by now, search can drive an incredible amount of traffic to your site. Whether you are selling products or services to your customers online, the concept is typically similar.

It is best to approach search as a key driver to your online business. If you are a typical “bricks and mortar” store, you will find that most of your successful offline tactics have little or no meaning within your online business model. For example, if your store sold electronics, you may consider the overall presentation of your products based on either price or popularity. While most online shoppers are looking for a very specific product or class or product, many of these buyers will use the credibility of the store as a key buying factor over price.

For a brick and mortar site, it’s important to start working with a development group who understands SEO and SEM, and will work with you to help prioritize your top products and categories within this process. Web sites that are well developed toward all markets, including users who may be disabled or visually impaired, will substantially increase your overall chances of domination within search engines.

Search engines insist that web sites be accessible to users who are disabled, especially those who are visually impaired. This is one of the most neglected user segments online. Search engines can tell if a site can be used by the special browsers for visually impaired users, and will generally rank those sites higher in their search results.

After building a high quality site, it is important to be sure that your products or services are named in such a way that people can find them easily. Be sure to use names that you would use to find them within the search engines. This type of marketing can be compared to putting up a billboard in a corn field in the middle of nowhere to having your advertising in the middle of times-square.

So instead of naming your product as “I love this special camera” try using a name that you would search for. It is best to test your search terms in several ways. First, try it in the search engine and see who shows up. If you are seeing the right sites, you are on the right track.

After searching, it is important to check and see how many people are searching for your product(s). This can be done through search suggestion tools provided by the major paid search engines. They will suggest phrases that they deem as a logical choice compared to what you put into the request form.

This will provide guidance based on what people are searching for. The estimations they provide are just that, estimations and can vary dramatically. Thus it’s important to buy these phrases and see how they perform in your particular use.

So be sure to understand how your products, categories and or services are labeled. This can make a very large impact on your traffic!

Want to stay on top of the latest search trends?

Get top insights and news from our search experts.

Related reading

Going by the major announcements we’ve already seen in January, 2018 is going to be a big year for Google, and AdWords will be no exception to that. I caught up with Ashley Fletcher, VP of Marketing at Adthena and former Product Manager at Google, to talk about we can expect from paid search in the coming year.

Thanks to the vast resources at the disposal of companies like Google, visual search is finally becoming viable. How, then, will SEO evolve as visual search develops? And how soon until SEO companies have to master visual search optimization?

Earlier this week, Searchmetrics published its fourth annual Winners and Losers Report, which reveals how certain sites fared in organic search visibility on Google.com during 2017. How do the results from this year stack up against last year, and what can we learn from the trends highlighted?

The budgets, metrics and processes that surround paid media campaigns are shrouded in obscurity, preventing the brands which buy advertising from knowing exactly where this spend is going, what they are buying, and how it is benefiting them. How can brands push for increased transparency in their dealings with agencies?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.